Entity Provider and Broker Usage

Information

This explains how to use the entity broker and entity provider system in Sakai

Usage of the Entity Broker

EntityBroker gives you access to all entities in Sakai including the legacy ones. It also provides methods for searching for entities using things like properties and tags.
Use the EntityBroker like any other Sakai component bean. You can inject it into any services and beans OR look it up manually using the Sakai ComponentManager.
- Inject it into a spring bean by creating a setter and adding the proeprty to your bean (normal Spring)
```
<bean id="yourBean" class="org.place.YourClass">
      <property name="entityBroker" ref="org.sakaiproject.entitybroker.EntityBroker" />
</bean>
```
- Get it from the Sakai component manager using a call to the ComponentManager cover
```
EntityBroker entityBroker = (EntityBroker) ComponentManager.get(EntityBroker.class);
```

Add the needed maven dependendencies to the your maven files

Maven 1 users will need soemthing like this in the project.xml:

<dependency>
	<groupId>sakaiproject</groupId>
	<artifactId>sakai-entitybroker-api</artifactId>
	<version>${sakai.version}</version>
</dependency>

Maven 2 users will need something like this in the pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.sakaiproject.entitybroker</groupId>
    <artifactId>entitybroker-api</artifactId>
    <version>1.3.3</version>
    <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

Now you can access the various methods on the EntityBroker like:

User user = (User) entityBroker.fetchEntity("/user/admin");
Site site = (Site) entityBroker.fetchEntity("/site/DG73G3GE33-3FJ3HR4RF-F3FJF3JF4H-F3R4FR4HH");